On Comitative Constructions in Slovak

This study describes and explains the semantics, syntagmatics and pragmatics of the comitative case in Slovak. It focuses on defining the comitative and its formal expression, i.e., how comitative constructions syncretize the concepts of accompaniment and gender inequality of personal participants in grammemes of the noun and verb. The types of comitative constructions are interpreted on the background of these principles: (i) the principle of a shared and unified activity; (ii) the principle of an added, absorbed and assigned participant(2), and (iii) the principle of the speaker's self-presentation. It is useful to study the connection of the comitative and coordinative strategy as cognitive and linguistic relations between the hierarchically (un)equal participants of the given situation and the expressions of hypotaxis and parataxis. The study defines the specifics of expressing comitative, coordinate-comitative and coordinative relations. We focus on the central position of the verb in the predicate, which has the ability to bind a number of other lexical complements and which, by its semantics and its valency potential, determines the form of a comitative construction. It introduces the concept of shared activity and shared involvement of participant(2), which influences the verb 's grammemes and the participant's(2) compulsory role in the construction of the proposition.